Apple's early brand was built on a couple of things, productivity and the education market.

Over thirty-three years ago, I bought my first Apple product. It was an Apple II+ and it revolutionized the way that I wrote and mailed a newsletter. I was a field representative for the Canadian Angus Association. My Apple with Apple Writer II, an Epson MX-80 printer, and DB Master changed the way that I worked. It turned a week's worth of frustration into something that could be done in a day.

Just six weeks after figuring that out in September 1982, I went to work for a TI mini-computer VAR that was dabbling in microcomputers. The one I bought was one of the first few that they sold. I became the microcomputer sales coordinator. Within a year we were selling over three million dollars of Apple product. I was hiring and training sales people as fast as I could. We opened four more stores across three provinces in the next two years. Eventually we had over twenty people dedicated to selling Apple's products.

The vast majority of those first sales were to education. In November 1984, a little over two years after I dispersed our cattle herd of over 200 Angus, I went to work for Apple. We moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. In the next year I closed an order for 1,300 Apple IIes. The order at the time was the largest single purchase order ever received by Apple Canada. It put an Apple IIe in every fifth grade classroom in Nova Scotia. I ended up finishing as the number two sales person in Apple's international division that year.

If you fast forward a few years to 1992, I had moved and was working with Apple in education in Virginia. My efforts had turned the colleges and universities in Virginia into an unbelievable success. I was named higher education account executive of the year for Apple USA. I was also promoted to higher education manager and joined Apple's extremely successful but short-lived higher education division with Jim Buckley at the head. I still wear the sweatshirt that I got at the first higher education managers' meeting in Colorado Springs.

Success in education was at the heart of my success at Apple. The education business along with the support of the creative community was also keeping Apple alive.

Apple's Higher Education division disappeared sometime around 1996 and I believe that the decline in Apple's education business began shortly after that. Part of the problem Apple was having at that time was trying to be a consumer company.

There was a lot of window dressing on the education market in subsequent years, but what Apple and Steve really wanted to do was become a consumer company. The iPod, iPad, and iPhone made that a reality.

Apple has probably become the most successful consumer products company the world has ever seen. However, I have to wonder if Apple sold its soul for that success?

Products that come out of Apple are still very nice and I am sure many educators still love them. Certainly there are some creative people still enthralled with their Macs, iPads, and iPhones.

From my perspective Apple products have become more suited for content consumers than content creators. I know the commercials say otherwise, but the people writing the commercials probably do not use Pages, Numbers, or Apple's Photo program. Even Apple rarely uses Pages or Numbers. Just ask someone who works there.

In the last year I have written about how Apple is no longer at the center of my world and that there would be no Apple under our tree in 2014. In the computer world, I cannot see how the equation has improved for an Apple. I still very pleased with the Lenovo desktop that was under the tree. Nothing Apple has introduced has sent me rushing to an Apple Store.

I am using El Capitan on my repaired iLemon. It is not a bad operating system, but I prefer Windows 10. I work for a Mac-based company and we struggle daily with Apple's software. Not long ago I had to export a document from Pages to Word to fix a problem and then import it back into Pages. Today I ended up doing a mail merge in Word on Windows. After I sent the file to our CEO, he commented about how much work it saved the home office because I got that and the labels all done so quickly.

It used to be that you used a Mac because things just worked on Macs. That not necessarily the case anymore. A lot depends on how hard you push the applications. Mail does not do a good job with all my email accounts so I use PostBox across all platforms. I am not an Outlook fan either. Photo does not accomplish anything I want. I average about 40,000 photos a year and they get processed in Lightroom on Windows. The long documents which were created with multiple style sheets in Pages O9 by our company are not much fun in the new Pages. I am happy to have almost no contact with Numbers.

As someone who spent many years selling Apple's computers to the education world at the CIO level, I feel some sadness in seeing Apple let that market slip through its fingers. As someone who depended on Macs for years to get my work done, I am disappointed at the state of Apple software. I also hate to say that there is no Apple hardware product with the features and pricing to earn a spot on my desktop or under the Christmas tree. I will stick with my current iMac, Mac mini, and my three Lenovos.

Time will tell if focusing everything on the iPhone world will be the right long term strategy for Apple. Certainly it has been a great money making strategy, but a legacy of money might not be what I would have hoped for the company that brought us so many amazing innovations.

To find out what life was really like in Apple sales, check out my book the Pomme Company. The stories are true. I am pleased to have over eleven wonderful years between me and my last day at Apple. That my life here on North Carolina's Crystal Coast only intersects a little with Apple is just fine with me.

January 26, 2015

There was a time when Apple was my family's world. It went far beyond technology since the company wrote our paycheck. Before Steve came back, Apple was much like a family. I can remember going to a memorial service with our vice president of higher education when the son of my regional manager was killed in a car crash. I can also remember the same vice president showing up at my father in law's funeral.

Our vacations were sometimes even Apple sponsored. If you were good in sales at Apple, you could win a golden Apple sales incentive Apple trip. We took trips like that to Paris, London, Vienna, Ireland, Australia, Munich, and Canada. I once even loaded my family in our Previa van and drove across the country from Virginia so I could attend a higher education conference in Monterey, California. A key customer was going, my manager said Apple could not afford to fly me out so I turned it into a family vacation.

I usally wrote with a Cross pen that had an Apple logo on it. I had a number of Apple watches and of course as any Apple employee will tell you, I had an imposing stack of Apple t-shirts. It would have unusual to come home from an Apple event without five to ten t-shirts. When I wore a suit, it had a gold Apple lapel pen with diamonds in it. It was an Apple life that went well beyond the technology.

Of course the technology was also there. There were Apple modems then Apple Airports and Quicktake digital cameras and even Apple scanners. Of course there were faithful Apple LaserWriters and color Imagewriters. Our home networking started with AppleTalk connectors. We even had an Apple CD player and I once carried the Sony-Erircsson T68i cell phone which Steve Jobs demoed on stage in 2002.

Most impressive of all, I had an Apple Color LaserWriter. As a manager working out of my own house the Color LaserWriter shipped to me not long after it was first introduced. The 110 pound printer was shipped to my house and that same week one caught fire at Penn State which was one of my team's accounts. It was the beginning of the end of the Color LaserWriter. None of the reps wanted to deal with it after the fire so it never left my house until it became surplus. For years it was very popular with neighborhood children who needed color graphs for their science projects.

The Apple technology in house spread to several neighbors. There were programs for Apple employees to let neighbors and family buy computers at a substantial discount. We had many neighbors take advantage of it.

Some of those computers in the days of the Performas and endless model confusion before Steve came back were not that great. I can remember replacing a few. A few of the ones that that had Intel processors on a card were especially flaky. Fortunately laptops were so expensive in those days that I had no close friend buy one of the infamous Apple 5300 laptops.

When Steve came back, pieces of the Apple life and products started disappearing. The Newton which had become a favorite of mine while I was traveling got canned along with printers and everything but a few computers. The new focus was good because some very good computers came out of it, and I bought several of them for the family. I did that even after purchases for the family from Apple became less and less of a good deal with Steve choosing to also make money off of employees. I believe I bought seven or eight iMacs for the family over the years. There still is probably a lamp shade iMac in one of our children's storage areas.

Most people know that Steve was focused on technology but few understand how focused he was on making money. I believe the culture of making lots of money pretty well defines everything Apple does these days.

For me Apple has itself whittled away much of their technology that I counted on at one time. I long ago retired my Airports and went to better, less expensive wireless equipment from other manufacturers. Even before I left Apple, I ended up switching to HP laser printers. Where once printers worked seamlessly on Macs, now it sometimes not the case. From the day I got it over eight years ago my HP Photosmart 6180 has been a challenge on my Macs. The last two OSX upgrades I installed it would work for a week and quit. I recently installed it on my new I7 Lenovo desktop. So far it is working flawlessly which it has done on a number of Windows computers over the years.

However, my LaserJet CP1025nw color printer has worked well on my Macs from the start. I have also had good luck with a number of Epson printers from their Professional 4000 servies on down and with a Canon Pixma printer. Printing is one of those things you never know until you try it. It once was not that way with Apple. An Apple printer would just work because Apple made certain that it did. I like to think printers mostly disappeared because Steve did not like the mess of paper. I think it was 2004 when we got an edict from Steve that we could no longer hand out paper brochures or information in our booths because it made the booths look messy.

Of course there are some programs that needed to die and iWeb was one of them. Apple has also made changes that made my love of its products a short term affair. Other times they have made me sound almost prophetic. I published this in 2007.

I haven't spent much time with the new iPhoto but my initial impression is that it is much easier to do web albums, but the export panel isn't as efficient or perhaps as quick to use.

I do really like the options that people viewing the albums are given. Apple has done a really nice job there.

I think web albums part of iLife is much better than the iWeb way of publishing photos. It's almost as good as the original iPhoto way of doing it. :) Of course I now have published photos in all three versions. I'm not sure how I manage the older ones.

I have one philosophical problem with the way Apple manages the web albums. If you make a mistake like I did and only publish one picture, the only way to get it off the web is to delete it in the web gallery section of iPhoto on my Mac.

It would make a whole lot more sense if you could manage it from the web instead of using an application on your computer.

If you try the links, the only one that does not work after seven and one half years is the one to the .Mac web gallery. Given that who would you trust with your photos? Certainly not Apple. At one time we were surrounded by an Apple life and now we are not. As much as there might be some readers out there ready to comment (and do not waste your time, it will not be published) that I have a grudge against Apple because they showed me the door (which by the way is how almost everyone in Apple sales that I know left), that really is not the case. My Apple career rests on always stellar performance reviews and a wall full of sales awards. Read my book if you want more.

Most tellingly I have spent something over $7,000 just on Apple hardware products since I left the company in 2004. I bought an Aluminum Powerbook G4 within days of leaving. A few months later I bought my dual G5 and Apple monitor which I still have and cherish. I bought a MacBook which I loved in spite of some early faults (and a dead memory slot) and an iMac which has required a lot of love. I now depend on a MacMini which had a tough early life and has no more ports left to give.

That is basically $700 per year on Apple hardware over ten years for five computers. That does not include external hard drives both Firewire and USB, keyboards, mice, cables, and adapters. The G5 is still running but unsupported by Apple. The MacBook is dead. The Powerbook G4 is dead but could be fixed but it would require more money than it is worth. The iMac is retired because I just do not want to spend any more money on upgrading its storage and I am irritated by yet another incompatible version of Pages. Taking the iMac apart is not something I want to do again even if that did increase its storage.

I have spent close to that many dollars on Windows computers in the same ten years. The only one of those nine computers that is dead is a Dell laptop that I bought in 2004. I gave it away and someone sat on it in 2011. So when I said there would be no Apple under the tree, there were plenty of reasons behind that decision.

I look at what could be classed as my Apple addiction in the same light that I do the $2,220 that I spend annually with Time-Warner. It is an expense that I need to manage better. With Netflix, Prime Video, and some of the other options popping up this year, I hope to halve that Time-Warner expense and get the Apple expense down to under $100 per year.

Maybe life would be different if I had not bought an original Droid five years ago. There has never been an iPhone in my life. I recently upgraded to a Droid Turbo and love it for all the same reasons that I loved the first one, ruggedness, great mapping capability and very good phone reception. I am also tremendously impressed with the turbo charging. I only plug the phone in for charging while I am having breakfast in the morning. Of course I have to chuckle at the email I exchanged with an Apple employee recently over an almost unintelligible OSX message.

"...too much focus on iOS and yet my phone still keeps crashing and has a defective battery they will not replace."

With no iPhone (because they had very poor reception initially in our coastal area ), it was easy not to fall under the spell of the iPad especially since my children gave me an original Kindle Fire at Christmas in 2011.

We have come a long way since Apple was at the center of our world. Now on the edge of Apple's world, I am more disappointed in Apple products than anything. I have not given up on Apple products but I am in more of a holding pattern waiting for a product to convince me that there is still genius at Apple that will produce a product worthy of my money.

I will continue to look for software to make my MacMini useful. No software that has caught my attention recently like Coda 2 seems to come from Apple. Pixelmator will stay as my choice for a couple of very specific tasks for awhile. We will see if Pixelmator can survive my new found access to the latest and greatest Photoshop. I also have one website that requires RapidWeaver unless or until I change it. It is not a good sign that I have not upgraded to the most recent version Rapidweaver.

Most of the software I need comes with the Mac, and the rest is reasonably priced.

The next is the list of programs that I believed five years ago to be keeping me on a Mac.

"RapidWeaver, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Fetch are the programs that keep me using a Mac. I also use Pages for one tri-fold brochure that I publish monthly. I am pretty sure that I could do it in Word, but I have never taken the time to try it. I could live without Pages."

It is funny how things have changed in five years. My Windows computers are the ones I count on now. They boot faster than my Mac and have done so for a long time. The famed Apple user interface consistency is not what it used to be. I would far rather use Techsmith's SnagIt on Windows than on a Mac. The user interface is better. The user interface is also better on Windows Mail 8.1. The iMovie user interface changes with every release and it seems that I have relearn it every time that I open it. We will not even get into the changes on Pages. The incompatible file formats are enough of a headache as Bregalad recently commented. When I am managing a lot of files or devices, I would far rather be using Windows 8.1 than a Mac.

I migrated my tri-fold brochure to Word long ago because the office printer I was using stopped supporting Macs after an upgrade. A few years after that I switched to a two-sided rack card that I now get Staples to print. I did have trouble printing the PDF proof of it last year from Pixelmator on a Mac and switched to Photoshop on Windows. I abandoned iPhoto and now Apple has it on the same chopping block that got iDVD. My sneaking suspicion is that things do not work as well on a Mac as they used to but other than anecdotal information, I have no real proof other than having to regularly reboot a couple of applications on my Mac. That never used to be a problem.

In the end many of those things that made me commit time and money to the Mac have disappeared. I bought my wife a Chromebook for Christmas. Her five year old HP laptop is still working but the battery life is not what she needs in spite of a new battery last winter. She loves her new Chromebook and I actually like it better than either of my tablets. I am amazed by the Chromebook's battery life, good screen, speed, and light weight. However, there is still an Apple IIe in a storage closet to keep the memories alive.

If computers are going to become disposable like Apple seems to hope, they need to be very inexpensive and I am not holding my breath for Apple to catch that wave. That is it from the Crystal Coast where we are on snowflake patrol while others are waiting for a potentially historic blizzard.

It could be argued that Apple's business has been built on education and education is still a key market for the company. The iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone are the current hot products for Apple and in general are well received in the education market. However no product stays at the top in education forever and Google attacking Apple's education pond is a much bigger problem than Google coming out with an arguably over-priced Chromebook (The Pixel).

I come at this as someone who spent about half of my nearly two decades at Apple selling to the education market. Back in the last days of the Apple II, I made one of the largest single purchase order sales of Apple IIes. It put an Apple IIe in every fifth grade classroom in Nova Scotia. I went on to be higher education account executive of the year in 1992 and then led Apple's most successful higher education team over the five years that Apple treated higher education as a separate market.

I got ripped out of higher education during one of Apple's many reorganizations in the mid-nineties but education stayed close to my heart.

For years Apple believed in the power of computers in education to create consumers of Apple technology. We used to take great pride in higher education that we sent college students home every Thanksgiving with full instructions as to what their families needed in the way of computer technology.

In the dark days of Apple, when it was hard to find a decent reseller of Apple products anywhere, you could discover many wonderful places to buy Macs on campuses well before Apple Stores ever showed up at the mall. Apple at the time was a real partner with campus resellers.

When I was director of federal sales at Apple, I can remember being flown to California twice to take part in education briefings. Schools in the period just after 2000, were worried that using Macs to teach their students would make them ill-prepared for a career in the business world. My job was to tell them about all the successes that the federal team was having at NASA, NIH, and the many federal labs. The not so subtle message was "Do you want your child just to learn how to use Microsoft Word or how to think like a scientist?" It was a powerful message and well received by many schools.

Apple is changed company since those days but Apple is still about convincing you that you need the next glitzy device. At Apple I heard Steve Jobs say many times that we were not an enterprise company but rather one that sold products that are sometimes very useful in the enterprise. He often followed that message with a comment about the heart of Apple being education.

So what happened? It would be easy to say that Apple became enthralled with its own gadets and maybe that is part of it. However, I think it was a much more subtle change and I have to put the blame on Steve Jobs and not Tim Cook. Tim Cook might be guiding the good ship Apple, but Steve Jobs put it on this course.

One of the biggest things that changed after Steve came back was how Apple interacted with its higher education and large business customers. There were changes with the K-12 customers but perhaps not so dramatic. If you were at Apple in the early nineties, you would probably agree that Apple and many of the thought leaders in higher education agreed that computing had the power to transform education. At one time Apple invested in many higher education projects. Apple also listened to higher education customers and worked with them to deliver exactly what their students needed for a college computing environment. There was a tremendous synergy between Apple and its higher education customers. We gave them special pricing, told them what we were going to do before we did it, and often protected them from their own mistakes.

Much of this changed when Steve came back. The first to go were customer meetings with publishing professionals. Steve did not enjoy customer meetings when he was not on a stage. While the higher education meetings continued, it was clear that Apple was not listening seriously.

The Cupertino briefings kept going for business, higher education, and K-12 customers but the amount of useful planning information that came out of the meetings declined. It was not unusual for Apple to pay the way of some K-12 executives to come to a Cupertino briefing but the true education partnerships were gone. However, the briefings also brought out another change that was close to Steve's heart. Apple sales people were excluded from customer briefings when non-disclosure information was discussed. Apple would often tell customers something that they were unwilling to tell their own sales people.

That might seem fine on the surface since no one likes sales people, but when you are company such as Apple which in essence walls itself off from its own customers except for the tiny scripted interactions that take place in an executive briefing, you need consistent, reliable feedback from your sales people as to the directions that customers are headed or the issues they need solved.

By not trusting its own sales people and giving up on customer advisory boards that often fueled Apple's own imagination, I believe Apple has become disconnected from some core elements of its customer base. Having some arrogant, perhaps even toxic sales vps has not helped Apple with its education customers. One of the worst ones is gone, but I suspect people are still trying to repair the damage that he did.

The second thing that I believe hurt Apple is the inability of the company to get web services right. While today's iCloud is better than it was, it is way too confusing compared to Google's Drive and Docs which just keep getting better and better.

The web has been an afterthought for Apple for as long as I can remember. Your web data has often been tied to a particular device just like your iPod. I remember a strong push from some of us in Apple's enterprise groups for a home directory that would work from USB thumb drives. I actually saw prototypes working but Steve shot it down because he thought people would screw it up.

Google has always abstracted the data from the hardware, Apple has always tied the data to a device in the hopes that you will buy a new one.

You can use Google Docs from just about any device including Macs of all stripes. Just try using Apple's cloud services from an Android device. Of course I have found Apple's cloud apps are often hobbled like the inability to do notes in Pages or presenter notes in Keynote. Actually you cannot even upload files from an old Mac to Apple's own Cloud drive. You have to use DropBox. How many schools have you visited where old Macs and in fact any old computers that they can find are part of their educational computing program?

While Apple was diddling around with the complexities of NetBoot, difficult to manage one to one laptop deployments and trying to convince educational customers that first the iPod, then the iPad was the greatest thing for education since chalk, Google went out and solved some real customer problems and gave educational users a way to use computers without a lot of hassle. They also gave them a keyboard, a way to collaborate, and they made it very inexpensive.

Apple makes very nice devices. On Black Friday, my wife and I were in Best Buy. I wanted her to have a look at a MacBook. Since I work for a company that uses Macs, I thought it would be nice for her to get a Mac so I would have one in case I needed to edit some Pages documents when we are traveling (and yes I have used Pages on the web). She spent some time with a MacBook Air and then went over and tried a Chromebook. Her question to me, "Why would anyone with basic browsing and email needs spend more than three times the money on a MacBook?" I had no answer.

For education customers the question turns out to be, "Why would I spent double the money on an iPad that doesn't meet the needs of my students as well as a Chromebook which is much easier to manage?"

It is a good question and most educational institutions have figured out the answer as we can see from the education sales figures.

January 30, 2014

I was hired to go to work at Apple in October of 1984, only a few months after the Macintosh was introduced. My first official day was November 26, 1984. In one of the few moves in those days targeted at saving money, my partner and I did not get to start until after the sales conference that year. We were sure they just did not want to spend the money for another two tickets to Hawaii from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

My days at Apple lasted until July of 2004. This summer it will be ten years since I left Apple and a lot has changed at the company and in my life. In 1984, fresh out of two years in sales management at an Apple reseller, Macs were the only computers in my life.

Today I am down to two Macs and my life has more Windows and Android devices than Apple products. At the peak of our addiction, and I include my family since they were all Mac users, we had well over a dozen Macintoshes not counting my collection of old Macs. Today the total number of Macs across the five adults in the family numbers three. The two that I have and one iMac that my older daughter has. No one in the family has an iPad or an iPhone. Even my wife who loved her 12” Powerbook well beyond its useful life is now using a HP laptop. I think we might be able to find two or three old iPods in drawers.

With the drop in Apple products in our family, I started wondering if the technology in our lives might have been different if Apple had been even more successful particularly outside the consumer world.

Sometimes it is hard to imagine that arguably the world’s most successful technology company might have been more successful, but I expect if you could find other ex-Apple sales folks besides me willing to talk, you might find a number who would agree with me that Apple could have gone farther in the enterprise if they had wanted to do so.

Back in December on my Applepeels blog, I posted an entry, The Decision That Lost The Desktop For Apple. In it I make the argument that the pricing decisions that Apple made at the height of the popularity for the Macintosh II had a huge impact on Apple’s desktop market share.

You could take my reasoning a little further and say that we were all hurt by Apple’s punting on the enterprise market. Certainly the federal information technology world which needs all the help it can get. I have argued at ReadWrite that federal IT is a mess.

Then there is the rest of the enterprise and publishing market which actually kept Apple afloat until Steve Jobs discovered the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. My career at Apple ended roughly about the time that Apple figured out that selling to consumers was a whole lot easier than meeting the demands of fussy CIOs. As an Apple product manager famously once told me, “Customers do not tell us what to make, we tell them what to buy.”

But what if Apple had been successful in the enterprise market? Many of us believed that Apple had all the elements needed to be successful there except the support of Steve. We had a great operating system that was far more secure from viruses at a time when Windows was being swallowed alive by all sorts of threats. In those early days of OS X even Apple laptops and professional desktops were very competitively priced.

We were able to get token support from Steve on some federal requirements like SmartCard support, but there was never a serious push into the enterprise after Steve came back to Apple. There was only ever a handful of enterprise sales people at Apple and in spite of some recent rumblings reported by Business Insider I don't think that is going to really change. My guess is that the 100 enterprise people Apple is looking for probably just cover the ones that got too expensive on the payroll and were let go.

When my team took over the federal market for Apple, we started with one sales person on each coast, one system engineer, my area associate, and me. We joked that we could hold team meetings in my Previa van.

Still Apple and my federal team in particular was very successful in the federal market. Many CIOs were tired of being held over a barrel by Microsoft. The cost for Microsoft Client Access Licenses (CALs) was a thorn in the side of many federal CIOs. However, no CIO federal or otherwise was stupid enough to bet their whole enterprise on Apple which refused to say in public that the enterprise was important to the success of company.

One of my last meetings at Apple was taking Avie Tevanian in June 2004 to see Karen Evans, who at the time was the CIO for the whole federal government. Avie got wound up trying to convince Karen to start developing applications with WebObjects. Karen handed him his head and told him the federal government had moved to COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software. She also asked him a question that sent him into a serious enough tailspin that I had to rescue him. She wanted to know why she should trust her important business to company that only ever talked about the consumer market and iPods?

The fact that Apple practically gave up on the federal market and has never taken a lot of the business world seriously left room for Microsoft to keep pounding away on their OS until they came up with Windows 7. The lack of a viable alternative to Microsoft meant they were to maintain their stranglehold on the feds. It also left a lot of the small business world firmly in the grip of Windows XP and its descendants.

My two older children are in IT and the youngest worked in a finance office. My wife worked in an insurance office and after Apple I sampled a number of different workplaces whose only common denominator like those of the rest of the family was that usually I was the only Mac user in groups as large as seventy to one hundred. I struggled through the pains of VISTA but was pleasantly surprised with Windows 7. I held off in getting a smartphone for a long time. A year after my son bought a Droid, I relented and followed his platform choice. I did not even consider an iPhone because the AT&T network was so bad here on the edges of civilization.

At WideOpen Networks job, I am happy to be back at a Mac centric company, but I am not going to give up my Windows gear. I like living in a multi-platform world and I know how fickle the winds of Apple are.

Had Apple been more successful in the enterprise market, my family might never have wandered away from the platform. Obviously Apple is very successful, but just imagine a world where you went to work and everyone was using Macs. I think Apple not pursuing the enterprise world left room for Microsoft to keep plugging away. There was a time when the argument that the Mac was a more secure platform was undeniable.

I stuck with Macs not because of any great love for Apple but because I like using the product. It is not inexpensive to use a Mac in spite of what some loyalists will tell you, but I find myself more productive doing certain things on a Mac so I have not given up on the platform.

Perhaps we have Apple to thank for the fact that we all can buy some pretty nice Windows hardware like my Lenovo Yoga at very reasonable prices and some great tablets like the inexpensive Nexus 7 that I have. If Apple had taken the enterprise market seriously and made some aggressive moves on pricing, this world might be even more Apple centric than it already is. Then again, all that success in the enterprise world might have distracted Apple and we would have never gotten the iPhone and iPad. Then it might have taken a long time for Android to develop and we would have all been stuck with Blackberries.

October 11, 2013

I certainly do not claim to be an expert on today's Apple. However, I have lots of history with the company and I have written the only book which describes what it was like to work at Apple in sales.

With that background I can look into the Cupertino tea cup and swirl the tea leaves as well as anyone.

Recent numbers on CNNMoney based on Gartner and IDC suggest that Apple might have had a period of "negative growth" in Mac sales during the critical back to school season. Both Mark Rogowsky, a contributor at Forbes, and John Gruber of Daring Fireball have recently chimed in with perspectives on Apple.

Others have chosen to spin this drop in sales as dramatic. I doubt Apple is any danger. They could keep Tim Cook in sushi almost indefinitely with their offshore billions.

The one take away that I have from Gruber's article is that today people who have the money are willing to pay for Macs.

The Mac today has roughly 10 percent of the PC market, but it’s not just any randomly distributed 10 percent of the market. Quite the opposite — Apple’s 10 percent of the market is entirely comprised of the high end of the market. Mac users are discriminating, willing to pay more for a product they deem superior.

I am not sure many price conscious buyers like me would be surprised that Mac buyers seem to have more money.

Long ago I hinted that Macs would have a hard time getting above 10 percent of the market, and price was a limiting factor then. I think things are perhaps even more challenging today.

My experience which is perhaps different than yours is that Macs have not delivered the value that I want in a computing platform. My computing closet still contains a very expensive 26" i5 iMac that died well before it was two years old. Hopefully it will be this year's holiday project for my son and I to install a new SSD in it.

With Apple's continued focus on thin and light, I have not seen the type of changes that once defined Apple's computer products and kept users on their seats and might have brought me back to its laptop platform. My Windows 8 laptop has a touch screen and it is almost a year old. Apple still does not have touch screens in their laptops and you cannot get an Apple laptop with a SD card reader for under $1,000.

"What it hasn’t done so far is seized on the weaknesses of HP, Dell and others, though, to build a world-class corporate sales organization to push its tablets and PCs aggressively into thousands of organizations worldwide."

As much as I have a problem with Gruber's "discriminating" buyer argument, I came close to choking upon reading the suggestion that Apple build "a world class sales organization."

Actually I think Apple had close to a world class sales organization in the early nineties. It was perhaps one of the things that kept Apple in business long enough for Steve to rescue the company from itself.

Certainly Steve did not love the sales organization and that is one of things that the field sales force clearly understood. Apple's sales leaders after Steve came back were undistinguished and often off base unless you somehow believe that going after the enterprise with iMac based kiosks was a good idea.

As for thoughts that should temper any suggestions that Apple go after the world's corporations with an enterprise sales force, this post, Lingering Regrets From Days At Apple, that I wrote seven years ago is still pertinent.

Apple will never be a successful enterprise sales company, it is not in the company's genes.The company had plenty of opportunities that Microsoft threw in their laps but they punted on them all.

Certainly after Apple's last flirtation with the enterprise which included the Xserve, I would think most large customers would have a hard time seriously considering Apple on the desktop.

If I were an enterprise CIO who had tried Xserves only to see Apple abandon them, I might be worried that Apple would completely give up desktops and laptops for iPhones, iPads, and iPods. The CIO of the federal government was worried about that when I took Avie Tevanian in to meet her back in 2004.

The only real opportunity for Apple in the enterprise is to keep doing what they are doing and penetrate the enterprise with iPads and iPhones which users will demand be supported.

More important in reading Apple's tea leaves than either Gruber's or Rogowsky's article is the hint that the back to school season was not good for Apple. I do not have any inside verification that back to school was not great for Apple. However, it would not surprise me.

Higher education has been a strategic but sometimes under appreciated market for Apple since I joined the company in 1984. One of the things that higher education has always done for Apple is put a device in the hands of the one person most likely to understand leading edge technology in a family, the college student. College students often go home and sell their families on Apple technology. When they graduate from college, they take their Apple devices to work and lobby for corporate support for Apple. It was a well appreciated sales cycle at Apple during my time as a higher education manager. Apple lost a lot of its higher education focus when it rolled the higher education division in with the K-12 folks back in the nineties.

The only time in my memory that we had a bad back to school at Apple during my career there was during Gil Amelio's brief tenure as Apple CEO. He decided that Apple was giving higher education students too good a deal on computers so he raised prices for students. Higher education sales tanked.

Now Apple's prices have not gone up, but their laptop prices have not gone down either. As I suggested in the article that I wrote over four years ago, all you have to do is walk the aisles of either a Best Buy or Staples to get a feeling for just how far PC laptop prices have gone down.

In spite of what Apple folks think, there are some very nice PC laptops out there. I use a first generation Lenovo Yoga which cost me under $1,000. It is my second Lenovo laptop and will not be my last. When I decide to pass this one on to someone else in the family, I will be buying the next generation Yoga. My Yoga has been one of the finest laptops that I have ever used.

Apple has come to believe it cannot make anything worthy of the Apple
brand at a low price point. Lenovo believes it can deliver quality and
still serve customers looking for a good deal.

If they are both right, that's a big win for Lenovo.

If you look at the CNNMoney charts, Lenovo has grown the most of any vendor. While one quarter is too early to make much more than an educated guess, it is possible that the Apple price differential on laptops has finally gotten too much for even college bound parents to bear. Tuition keeps going up and family incomes have not gone up.

We are in a tough economy and the reality is that Apple is a luxury brand. There is protection in being a luxury brand as Gruber hints, but there are limits to your growth if some of your strategic customers have decided your products are too expensive.

Perhaps Apple's actual numbers will spin all of this a little differently. Certainly there is no cause for doom and gloom in the Apple world. After all, someday they might actually ship that new Mac Pro that they announced in June and of course we are due for an iPad refresh. Let me guess, they will be thinner and lighter but will still be lots more expensive than a Nexus or Kindle. Did I tell you I suspected the "new" iPhone might sport some color?

Best Buy's Sunday, October 13, 2013, flyer lists a Lenovo laptop with an I7 processor, a 15" touch screen which is bigger than the 13" MacBook Pro for $829.99. The hard drive is smaller on the Lenovo but the bigger screen would make that a wash for me. As someone told me when I bought my MacMini, you can find USB optical drives for under $70 if you really need one.

I have used a lot of Mac laptops and I judge the quality to be similar to Lenovo. You can make your own judgment, but as of October 13, 2013, you pay a 81% premium for buying a MacBook over a Lenovo. Unless you put a lot of value on Thunderbolt, aluminum, and Firewire 800 as opposed to USB 3.0, I think the Lenovo is a better buy especially for college students.

Laptops are almost a necessity for college students and those of us who travel for work. The word that comes to mind for someone willing to pay 81% more for a product that will likely need to be updated in three or four years no matter which one you buy certainly is not "discriminating."

April 30, 2013

It has been nearly two months since I scanned the headlines on Apple websites. It has been even longer since I wrote my last article on Apple at ReadWrite. I have been busy getting two books out the door.

I am not surprised that there is little to draw me beyond the typical Apple headlines. I got the feeling that Apple and I were heading in different directions as I was finishing up my books. I am one of those people who still work with desktop computers, build websites, manipulate photos and graphics. I suspect in Apple's world that I am something of a dinosaur. I judge platforms by the applications that they bring to me and the productivity that I find from using those tools. I do not own an iPhone or an iPad.

Still I am not here to argue that Apple is going to disappear, is poorly managed, or has crummy products. By most financial measurements Apple of 2013 is a great success. Unfortunately, all that success has not made it to my desktop. I am here to report that I see little reason to keep Apple on my immediate radar. I am actually down to two applications that only run on a Mac. I still cling to Pixelmator as a favorite graphics tool and I have a couple of websites where I use Rapidweaver, but that is it. The rest of my Mac experience is gone. I got tired of waiting for new versions of the iWork suite. iPhoto managled one too many photo libraries and why anyone would put up with iCloud and its services is beyond me. I use Postbox on Windows for my mail.

I did give Apple a fair chance at keeping my loyalty. I bought a new MacMini in January and with the OX 10.8.3 update it has become a stable and reliable partner. It is not nearly as fast as my similarly powered Lenovo desktop running Windows 8 but speed is not really the issue. The real issue is that there is no software that draws me over to the Mac platform and I am not that happy with the Mountain Lion interface which should scare folks since Windows 8 is my main other platform.

I thought iAuthor might be something that would be important to me, but when I found out that it would only work with an iPad attached, I gave up on the Mac as my publishing platform. Amazon has a very capable piece of software that emulates a Kindle which I can use to view my work before I publish. There are some subtantial advantages to being on the Kindle platform so it did not take much to kill the idea of moving my books over to the iPad. While I am not a huge fan of Word, it seems to be the best tool with the most specific instructions for creating books to be published on the Kindle platform. I actually tried my older version of Word running on the Mac but it just made for some additional work.

Then there is the whole cloud issue. DropBox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive all work very well and do what I need. I have still not met anyone who loves iCloud. I know Apple keeps making some incremental changes to Photostreaming to make it palatable, but I have been burned too many times by Apple's ever changing online photo storage strategies. I do not care about iCloud anymore.

This August will mark thirty-one years since I first came to the Apple platform. I got excited about it because I could do things with that first Apple II+ and subsequent Macs that I could not easily do with other computers. That has changed and I did fight the change. Over the years I campaigned for a better and more reliable iPhoto and even a small tower that would more closely meet the needs of those of us who still believe that creating quality content requires more than an iPad or iPhone. I even sort of grew to like Pages before I decided it had become just another abandoned Apple software product.

Even if Apple does come up with a tower, I likely will not be looking at it because I do not see a new version of Microsoft Office coming to the Mac in the near future. I have more hope that I will figure out how to use Google Docs to publish my books than I do that Microsoft is going to bring an upgraded version of Office to the Mac. It is not that I love Google more than Apple but they do update their core products regularly. Beyond the Office issue, Apple has become an expensive platform. If you want to argue with me on that consider first that I have purchased three I5 computers in the last six months, one Lenovo Ultra Book, one Lenovo tower, and one MacMini so I know what comes with each system. I am not really intrigued by ever thinner iMacs. I would rather have a more reliable one instead of the one in my equipment closet that died an early death.

As I watch Apple executing its huge bond deal in order to buy stock back to keep its stockholders happy, I have to wonder what it would have cost to get some upgraded iWork apps out the door and make OS X better not just glitzier. Some professional Mac users would have paid for those new Apple products. That the MacMini on my desktop is more a curiosity than my workhorse is a little sad. After all, over thirty years is a long time to live on a particular platform, but when all the signals to move on are there, it is hard to ignore them.

Years ago Apple gave me the tools to do some really neat things. Today the deep integration of Google's mapping software and its seamless integration with Google's cloud services for maps and photos let me create a rather unique travel guide. The mapping done on my Android phone would not have been as easy on the iPhone. Certainly the mapping tools in Lightroom sealed the deal for me. My decision to run Lighroom on my Lenovo tower came down to pure economics. The $599 MacMini came with a 500 GB hard drive and the $479 Lenovo came with a 1 TB hard drive and had more room for photos. Its storage is also more easily upgradeable than the MacMini's.

I will continue to keep an eye on Apple, but it will be more to fulfill my curiosity than to plan any further purchases. I have no doubts that there are plenty of folks out there sitting on the edge of their chairs just waiting for the next Apple product. I hope whatever it is goes well for Apple and for them.

February 10, 2013

We all have different expectations from the companies that have helped define our lives. My hopes for Apple revolve around the tools that the company created or helped popularize over the years. Many of those innovations let me do things that I could hardly imagine.

With me it started with an Apple II+, AppleWriter II, and an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. Then there was the Mac, Pagemaker, and Illutrator, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. While not all of these came from Apple, their initial releases were tied closely to the Macintosh. Since the announcement of the Mac, the Mac desktop has been an important part of my life. Today I still use the Mac, just not as much. Linux has won a significant piece of my desktop.

Even when I gave my desktop over completely to Apple, it was not always been a smooth ride. Products like Claris Emailer and iDVD were dropped. Some things like iPhoto's integration with the Cloud and web pages have changed for the worse. Perhaps iWeb was the best indication that Apple never could quite understand that to be successful on the web you need to divorce the device from the data. Google certainly understands that. I would even argue that Microsoft is better at it than Apple. Then there is an application like Pages which took me a long time to embrace for a few things only to watch Apple decide to ignore it. I might not agree with Microsoft's direction on Excel, but I doubt they will ever ignore it.

Apple's misunderstanding of the cloud imight someday be looked upon as a major mistake. Still there is no question that Apple remains a money machine. What I am wondering is can Apple still innovate in a way that really matters. It is not a new question. I found this August 18, 2011 article by Brandt Dainow, Why the iAd was a failure, an interesting read. I especially like this quotation which refers to an earlier article of his.

The thrust of my criticism was that if Apple creates aspirational and innovative new products, but then restricts access to them, it forces others to create competing systems. By refusing hardware manufacturers such as Samsung and Nokia access to the iOS system, Apple forced them into the arms of Google and Microsoft. I argued that, just as the Mac had gone from 30 percent market share at its peak to less than 3 percent today, so would the iPhone go in the mobile market.

While the Mac has gotten up to 10% or so of market share, there are those who are now arguing that it has peaked.

It turns out that a lot of what Apple has done throughout its history is to create innovations and then to try to wall them off. There was a time before Windows 7 when many computer users would have loved to have the more secure and capable OS X running on their Dell or HP. Apple was sure that letting OS X into the wild would destroy the company. It turned out that Apple's success was not destined to come from OS X anyway. It was going to come from the iPod, iPhone, and iPad and related services which now make up close to 86% of Apple's revenue. I always thought that it was funny that I had to buy a third-party add-on for iPhoto just to do something as simple as put my photos in Google's Picasa web albums without resorting to a browser.

In a sense Apple is now trying to use OS X to drag along those of us still creating content with Macs. It likely will not work. The web is changing everything and Apple's walled worlds are showing some huge cracks. Android may be as unstoppable in the mobile market as Windows was in the desktop market.

Android runs on a lot of hardware from different companies. I like to compare the sharing options that I get when viewing an image on the Mac with what I get when viewing an image in the gallery on my Android phone. There are twenty choices on my LG Spectrum phone instead of the seven choices in Apple's Preview. Of course Apple is not the only guilty party in limiting our choices. When I want to share a photo from my Amazon Cloud Drive using my Kindle Fire, I only get four choices. That lack of choice has a lot to do with my decision to make a Nexus 7 my main tablet. I get more choice on a lot of things.

By trying to control everything, Apple limits our choice and opens the door to innovation from others. But if the limitations that Apple forces on us are severe enough, then the market is guaranteed to respond with other choices. Some of the choices might not be goods ones, but then again some of those choices might be really good ones like the Nexus 7 that I'm using.

While some argue that the only way for a good user experience is to let Apple control everything, my experience has shown that Apple cares little about the user experience except to want to use it to prod me towards their vision of a pure world with only Apple products and services.

It will be interesting to see how well Microsoft's experiment in using their operating system to prod us toward tablets and the Surface Pro will work. Actually the operating systems of both Microsoft and Apple are not very high on my list these days. I am moving towards a roll your environment using virtualization. Look for my upcoming article on it at readwrite.

For now I would like just one sign that Apple cares about my user experience. I will nominate bringing back the "Escape" key in iPhoto as a way to return to the library instead of clicking on the annoying "Photos" button. I doubt we will see that since the march of Mac OS X towards iOS likely will accelerate instead of slow down.

In truth, it does not matter. I have found a new solution, Adobe's Lightroom. Guess what? The "Escape key" works like it should there. A better sign for me to pay attention to is Frank, our great egret from Canada.

September 20, 2012

My up and down relationship with Apple still hasn't reached a turning point. I remain hopeful that Cupertino will announce a product that will catch my fancy. I have a long history with the company.

I have enjoyed watching the launch of the new iPhone 5, but I am still happy with my Android powered LG Spectrum and the Kindle Fire my children gave me last fall. I am waiting for some Apple products to excite all of us who built our digital lives around Apple solutions.

With all the media coverage around the iPhone 5 announcement, I especially enjoyed the Jimmy Kimmel segment where some supposed iPhone users couldn't tell the difference between the iPhone 4S they were being shown and the new iPhone 5. However, perhaps that is a cheap shot. I'm not sure I could tell you the difference between my latest LG Smartphone and whatever new product LG has announced.

Beyond being the butt of a few jokes on late night comedy shows, there are some serious problems with Apple.

It is easy to ignore the issues if you just measure the company by their unbelievable stock price. Before I go further let me say that I still believe that Apple makes great hardware products, and perhaps the latest iPhone and iPad are among the best they have ever made.

The question for me comes down to this, can the Apple of today follow through with its direction without paying better attention to its computer and software roots?

Perhaps the most worrisome issue for me, is the health of Mac OSX. Having only recently taken the step to go to Lion, I still haven't upgraded to Mountain Lion. I normally don't jump on an Apple first release, and I was actually hoping that Apple would announce a new Mac Mini by this time. If that had happened I could take the step to Mountain Lion with new hardware.

Lion has been a mixed experience for me. Perhaps you need an iOS device to really see its benefits, but I get the distinct feeling that there are now far too many ways to do the same thing on OS X. I believe that some of the simplistic beauty of OSX has been lost as a layer of complexity has been added.

While I am worried about OSX, I am downright depressed about iPhoto. I was at Apple when Steve was focused on the release of iPhoto. It was a revolutionary program at the time, and it had the full attention of Steve.

I'm pretty sure that Steve would not be happy with the current user interface on iPhoto. One of the great things about the original version of iPhoto was the ease with which you could create a web album for your friends to see. In the latest version of iPhoto on the Mac we are stuck with photostream which seems to be an all or nothing solution unless you want to use Flickr or Facebook.

As a photographer who sometimes takes a thousand pictures in a day. I want to be able to quickly sort through the pictures, select the good ones, make some adjustments, put copies of the ones I like in cloud storage, and then create web albums of ones that I plan to show to more than a few people. That process used to be very simple with a Mac. That is no longer the case.

I now do my initial photo sorting and tune-ups on a Windows 7 laptop because it is easier with Picasa than it is with iPhoto. In a number of areas where iPhoto was ahead of Picasa, Apple has managed to dumb down recent versions of iPhoto. While this was happening Google actually made Picasa better and more efficient. While I have Picasa on the Mac, I have hung with iPhoto hoping it would get better.

While Picasa might not look as glitzy as iPhoto, you will get more work done with Picasa. On top of that Picasa easily puts one or dozens of photos on the web with easily controllable access. I haven't tried to find the extra cost plug-in that I purchased for my previous versions of iPhoto so I could directly load photos into Picasa web albums from iPhoto. Likely the reason is that I resent paying for something that should be there.

It really is a final straw for me that in iPhoto Apple has built-in Flickr and Facebook support but has ignored Picasa web albums. I know they are doing this to spite Google, but users are the ones who suffer and Apple offers no solution of its own comparable to Picasa web albums.

If you want to delve into this deeper, read a post or two of mine which compares iPhoto and Picasa.

An even bigger problem is that Apple seems to have fallen into the old trap of if it wasn't invented at Apple, it can't be good. The recent ditching of Google maps is just not something that will work out well for Apple over the long term.

I have no question that Apple has the money to create a great map solution, but I seriously doubt Apple has the management culture and the persistence to stick with their own mapping solution until it is a great product. It is not in Apple's DNA to incrementally upgrade software or a backend solution until it is a really solid product.

If you don't believe me, just think back to the original .Mac product and all its many iterations including iCloud which was going to change everything.

Compare Apple's cloud solution with GoogleDrive, SkyDrive, or DropBox, and it looks like making a home grown solution isn't necessarily the best path for Apple.

Apple has a history of alienating partners and having to go it on their
own. Maps is just a symptom of that problem. As an Apple employee once told me, you can't say the word "partner" and Apple in the same sentence. Let's hope that Apple makes nice with Microsoft so they don't pull the plug on Office for the
Mac.

Even if Maps is a good idea, many good Apple ideas have withered on the vine for lack of attention. Does anyone remember eWorld, Apple's online world that was going to be better than AOL?

And if that comparison doesn't ring true, just look at the history of Apple branded or backed word processors for the Mac and compare that to Microsoft which does have a history of banging its head against the wall and showering money on a project until they either succeed (Word & XBox) or fail (Zune).

Remember back to the introduction of the original Mac. It came with MacWrite. It wasn't long after the introduction of the Mac that Microsoft came out with Word. MacWrite after the Claris spinoff eventually became MacWrite Pro.

Then came ClarisWorks which eventually became AppleWorks before disappearing completely. Now we have Pages which will eventually languish like the rest of Apple's word processors. Word is still around.

The lack of a culture built around incrementally improving products as opposed to ditching them is a huge challenge in the technology world. While Apple might have mastered it with the iPhone, they have a number of other products begging for updates.

Beyond this I believe the biggest problem that Apple has is the wall that the company throws up between the company and its customers.

While Microsoft and other companies are working hard to listen to customers, Apple is busy listening to itself. If you are going to incrementally improve something like a map solution, you need a close working relationship with your users. I have sent Google a few notes over the years about problems that I have found on their maps. While I have never heard back from them, every problem that I found has been resolved.

I'm not sure Apple knows how to act similarly. Perhaps if Apple could develop a strategy to start reaching out to customers in a company supported blog, it might be a first step, but unfortunately the company's DNA would have to change before they started blogging.

As long as Apple can keep iPhones and iPads flying out the door, perhaps all these issues are irrelevant. But I do believe that Apple's OSX software is a strategic product and deserves serious attention that it is not getting.

If Apple does hit a blip, and it likely will, I suspect many of the customers who came to Apple's rescue in the past will be gone. It remains to be seen whether current iPhone and iPad customers will be as loyal or just jump ship for the next shiny trinket.

Just a few updates and I'm off to bed.

We spent a good part of the summer doing our final move from our house in Roanoke, Virginia. We have bid Roanoke adieu, and we will no longer be making our once a month trip from the coast to the mountain.

If the fishing doesn't require my full attention this fall and if I don't fall under the spell of the area's blue skies, I hope to finally get the book about my Apple career published. It has been a bigger challenge than I thought it would be.

July 20, 2012

"Certainly if I considered the .Mac experience to be the best measure of Apple's web understanding, I would have to give Apple a failing grade. There is no way around it, .Mac is not worth what many of us pay for it."

It is hard to believe that five years later Apple could decide to make its new iCloud service free, and iCloud might even be less useful than .Mac or MobileMe.

"Apple's cloud services continue to be more than a blemish on the company's reputation. They are a serious black hole."

I am not really surprised that Apple hasn't figured out the cloud because Apple has never understood that to really be a web player you have to free the data from the device.

All you have to is look at the way iWeb was built. It tried its best to tie the website to a particular Mac. Using iWeb to build a website on multiple Macs required jumping through hoops and moving huge files around by thumbdrives.

The shame of Apple's failures in the cloud is that when it came to many things about the web, Apple was a leader. There was no easier way to put photos on the web than the original iPhoto.

Unfortunately that is no longer the case. Adding photos to your Picasa web albums, Google drive, Dropbox or your Microsoft Skydrive is much easier than fooling around with your photostream. If you take a hundred photos and want to put some of the best of them on the web, it is easy to do with any of the products besides Apple's iCloud.

Interestingly ever since I bought my original Droid in 2010, all the photos that I have chosen to be on the web have been automatically been synced to my phone, the web, and any computer that I choose. In fact even with a couple of Gmail accounts to my name, things have worked perfectly with my contacts and mail. I haven't had a glitch in over two years. I can use Gmail as a web client or with Apple mail, Postbox, or Thunderbird. It doesn't matter.

With Google's services I have access to my contacts, email, and photos from Windows, Linux, Lion, and all my older Macs.

With iCloud, my older Macs are completely shut out from iCloud unless I use Safari. Interestingly my former MobileMe accounts work fine in Postbox and Thunderbird on Windows 7. More importantly all the photos that I put on Picasa web albums and Flickr are still there instead of mysteriously appearing unannounced in my most recent iPhoto library and disappearing from the web.

I believe that unless Apple can figure out the cloud, the great products may not matter. With the frustrations that I have had with Apple's software, I am less inclined to try the company's new hardware.

Recent tests that show the Nexus 7 tablet besting the iPad just confirm my recent unfortunate experience with Apple hardware which has a long tradition of being the best. Since 2004, I have purchased five Windows laptops and two Mac laptops. All of my Windows laptops except one which someone sat on are still running. Neither of my Mac laptops are functional. It is a small sample, but it has to influence my personal decision on hardware purchases especially since the two Mac laptops cost almost as much as the five Windows laptops.

The iMac that I purchased in October 2010 has also been problematic. I am now running it off an external drive with Lion after having serious problems with slow Snow Leopard. We have three Windows 7 laptops that have been models of software stability and reliability. I don't say that to slam Apple but to convey my personal experience which has shaken my faith in Apple hardware and software.

When you add Apple lack's of understanding of the web, poor implementation of iCloud, and software problems, it makes you wonder if Apple is on the right track.

I remain hopeful, but seriously how many years is it going to take Apple to figure out the web?

Fortunately, I am living my dream far away from Cupterino and there are lots of tools out there better iCloud.

By the way this is the 400th post that I have written for Applepeels. Only a handful of them are still online, but the book is coming this summer. If you have ever wondered what it was like to spend nearly twenty years at Apple, you will be able to read my story soon.

April 20, 2012

I actually don't see very many television commercials because I watch very little television. While I know that television commercials are not a locked-in-stone view of the future, they do give us some insight into the companies who put them on the air. Commercials especially help us identify the products that business like Apple love the most.

While it might not go into the annals of silliest commercials, Apple's last "Siri" commercial which features someone ordering take-out tomato soup deserves some consideration.

Long ago, Apple had a marketing campaign based on a flying car. It didn't last long. Perhaps it was just before its time since flying cars seem to be coming back for real.

However, some of Apple's campaign's have really resonated with computer users.

Perhaps my favorite was the one with the dog and the young boy who unpacked his iMac and got on the Internet faster than an adult male who had purchased a Windows computer.

I think the commercial was a homerun because at the time, getting a computer other than a Mac functioning was a really time-consuming and frustrating experience. Getting an iMac going was pretty easy. Of course life even with an iMac was a whole lot better when it got a Firewire port and could write CD-ROMs.

We have come a long way since the iMac was first introduced. Other manufacturers have learned a lot from Apple. I would argue that setting up a new Windows PC is not very different from a new Mac today. I have done both in the last couple of years.

I don't think it is difficult to argue that Apple isn't nearly as interested in desktop and laptop computers today as they are in iPads and iPhones. Long ago I predicted that Apple desktop and laptop market share would peak at around ten percent. I think that is pretty close to their current US market share. I don't see it growing.

However, I never guessed that peaking at ten percent would be because Apple has lost interest in computers. I know that iPhones and iPads are selling like hot cakes but isn't a Mac still at the heart of it? You certainly can't run iCloud without a Mac to create your identity.

Maybe Apple's focus on small gadgets is finally reaching Mac lovers as it appears that users might not be jumping on Apple's iCloud bandwagon. Apple is now giving away Snow Leopard to make it easier for users to buy Lion.

Maybe Apple's marketing has become silly enough that it is no longer a company strength. Or perhaps potential computer purcahsers aren't interested in searching for take-out tomato soup with their phone assistant?

If you ask me to define Apple's current marketing message, I would say it is all about very fancy screens for tablets and a future where we are reduced to ordering take-out tomato soup.

Maybe I grew up in a different world, but the thought of being lazy enough to order take-out tomato soup is beyond what I can imagine. And in this world where people are struggling to find jobs, does Apple really believe that there are people out there who can afford to order take-out tomato soup or who even would want to?

If the computer future that Apple envisions for us is asking my phone silly questions and following the responses, it might be time to say out loud that Steve's absence is being felt.

Those of you who still know how to cook might want to try my grilled salmon recipe which is at the end of this post.